In Saint Peter of Rhodes Almost everything exudes mystery. The monastery rises like a colossus among the rugged mountains of Cap de Creus, with the sea at its feet and the howling of the tramontana wind. Next to it is the village of Santa Cruz de Ruedaswhich was hastily abandoned sometime in the 15th or 16th centuries. The marble portal of the monastery, which was a great medieval spiritual and pilgrimage center, disappeared. And the author, the Master of Cabestany, It is surrounded by enigmas. The exhibition Saint Peter of Rhodes and the Master of Cabestany. The creation of a myth, The exhibition, on view at the MNAC until June 29, answers some questions, but above all, it's a journey through a fascinating history.

The expansion of the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC) at the Palau Victoria Eugenia has been given the green light. This Monday, the president, Salvador Illa; the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun; and the mayor of Barcelona, ​​Jaume Collboni, officially presented the architectural project by the studios Harquitectes and Christ & Gantenbein, which unanimously won the competition a year ago with a proposal entitled Museum passageThe architectural plans for the expansion were unveiled at the Palau Victoria Eugenia itself as soon as several appeals filed by one of the unsuccessful competition teams were resolved. "Getting to this point is a collective success," said the museum's director, Pepe Serra, who described the expansion as "legitimate and necessary." Similarly, for the President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, the expansion is a national project, "of the same importance as the Sagrada Familia, Catalunya Média City, the Archaeological Museum of Tarraco, the transformation of Fira de Barcelona, ​​Barcelona Airport, or the Sagrera train station." Meanwhile, the museum's president, Jaume Oliveras, said he sees it as "the fruit of the poetics of perseverance." The most important goal of the expansion is that it will allow the museum to display its collections up to the present day. "We are resolving a unique cultural anomaly in Europe," said Serra. "The museum should be the artists' home," he added. One of the cornerstones of the Harquitectes and Christ & Gantenbein project is opening up the Victoria Eugenia Palace, which measures almost 15,000 square meters, to the city. That's why they've placed the entrance on the façade facing Plaça Carles Buïgas, which it shares with the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion. "It will be the grand lobby of the museum complex," said Josep Ricart, one of the founders of the Harquitectes studio. It won't be a showy intervention; the cut in Puig i Cadafalch's work, specifically in the base, will be strictly necessary. The existing ramp will also be removed. "The only place in the catalog entry that says we can intervene is the base," Ricart said. "We want to extend the public space within the MNAC," he emphasized. The presentation was also attended by the Secretary of State for Culture, Jordi Martí; The Minister of Culture, Sònia Hernández Almodóvar, and many of the directors of the facilities belonging to the Network of Art Museums of Catalonia. With the expansion, the museum will have almost double the exhibition space, increasing from 10,941 to 19,425 square meters. The total usable area of ​​the museum, including both public and internal spaces, will increase from 38,390 to 55,288 square meters. The constructed area will increase from 49,000 to 71,417 square meters.

While thousands of people fled as best they could toward the French border, on February 4, 1939, at the Can Pol farmhouse in Montfullà, Bescanó, where the Generalitat (Catalan government) had stored works of art from Tarragona to protect them from the war, a woman and her children awaited the arrival of Franco's troops. The woman in question was Rosa Sendrós Carbonella, the wife of Pere Rius, the curator of the Reus Museum, and she had the delicate task of handing over the keys to the storage facility to the rebel soldiers. This anecdote perfectly illustrates the story the exhibition aims to tell. Recovered from the enemy. Francoist caches at the MNACwhich can be seen at the National Art Museum of Catalonia until June 28. In the first room, there is another document that demonstrates this commitment by Catalan institutions to safeguarding heritage: a sketch made by the archivist Agustí Duran i Sanpere showing all the collections distributed throughout Catalonia, to facilitate the work of the victors.

With the record number of plays on Spotify that it achieved LuxRosalía's latest albumIt's plausible to imagine that some of the people who attended Tuesday's presentation of Barcelona's cultural offerings at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid might have heard some of her new songs on their way to the event organized by Turisme de Barcelona. "The Palau de la Música Chamber Choir is featured on the album every day," asserted Joan Oller, general director of the Palau de la Música. "It was recorded at L'Auditori," added Víctor Medem, his counterpart at the Barcelona music venue. Valentí Oviedo, director of the Gran Teatre del Liceu, chimed in: "Rosalía hasn't sung at the Liceu, but I invite her to come and sing there whenever she wants. I'm not going to let the others down now," he joked.

"Onward, onward, onward, long live the wild!" "Pixadora fog, it's raining all the time!": a demonstration begins inside the Oval Room of the MNAC, led by the artist Marcelino Antúnez Roca, which brings to life the large participatory installation that he presents until January 6, entitled Marcelino Antúnez Roca. Nature, east-central. Oval Camp. Antúnez is accompanied by a band of musicians, Fail Again Ensemble (Marceluia and her Mireios) and a string of performersAnd all of this is a call to rebel while having fun.

A few days ago, four museum experts met at the MNAC in Barcelona and expressed their concern about the institution's direction, the decline in visitors from the city's middle class who, as in other European capitals, have lost interest in the culture of the past, and the blurred character of the concept which every museum must define. Specialists considered the MNAC "a unique and magnificent collection," certainly one that "formalizes Catalan identity and contemporary identity." The idea is sound, but it should be borne in mind that Catalan identity and contemporary identity are rather contradictory, because "contemporary identity," in global terms, does not form any unity, but rather a general fragmentation or a bastardized identity. And furthermore: "The public increasingly misunderstands the identity and mission of Catalonia's most important museum."

The lawyer for the Vilanova de Sijena City Council, Jorge Español, announced this Tuesday that he will file a lawsuit against the director of the MNAC. Pepe SerraThe lawyer is referring to statements made by Serra at a press conference on Monday, in which he questioned the lawyer's qualifications. Serra had requested the suspension of a listening session for Rosalía's new album at the Oval Room, citing concerns about potential damage to the paintings, without any prior assessment of their condition before they could be moved. According to media present, Serra said: "What's unacceptable is considering that a Rosalía concert could affect the paintings and that squeezing them into 74 pieces is easily done. Whoever says this should see a doctor."

The government of Aragon accuses the MNAC of having acted with "negligence" and "lack of diligence" in the care of the mural paintings of Sijena and maintains that it is "safer" to install them in the monastery than to keep them in Barcelona. As reported by ACN, the preliminary results of the reports prepared by Aragonese technicians indicate a "lack of maintenance," "direct" effects due to humidity in some fragments, and the presence of dirt—such as cigarette butts, insects, or debris—behind the scenes, within the support structures of the paintings. "The conservation of the paintings has not met the necessary and desirable standards. If it were Catalan heritage, they would have preferred it, but it belongs to the Aragonese," stated the Director General of Culture of Aragon, Pedro Olloqui.

It was May 1991, and the National Palace, located at the foot of Montjuïc, was being remodeled to become the permanent home of the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC). It was a time of transition and chaos. In a storage room, there was a metal cabinet containing a jewel: the Sijena peace-bearer, a unique piece of Gothic goldsmithing dating back to 1400. It was a small piece, about ten centimeters, made of precious materials, which, without anyone noticing, disappeared.

The Ministry of Culture must explicitly position itself on the risks of moving the murals from the Sijena chapter house. A document from the MNAC, filed this Monday in the Huesca court, states that on Friday, the museum's president, Joan Oliveras, requested a letter from Minister Ernest Urtasun for a report from the Spanish Institute of Cultural Heritage (IPCE) on the suitability of moving the paintings. Although ministry technicians have been part of the working group on the murals, this is the first time the museum has made this request to the IPCE, considered the highest authority on art preservation in the country.

The Government of Aragon has asked the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, to explain what work is being carried out on the murals in the chapter house of the Sijena Monastery by technicians from the Spanish Cultural Heritage Institute (IPCE), the Ministry itself, and the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC). In a letter sent to the Minister and the Court of First Instance and Investigation of Huesca, the Government of Aragon requests that the judge be informed of all the actions being carried out. The Director General of Culture of Aragon, Pedro Olloqui, has warned that any work on the paintings at the MNAC "must have the authorization of the owner."

Let me state the obvious. UA museum is an academic institution designed to collect the best and most significant works of art.heThe fields of study and research that explain who we are, how we behave, how we organize ourselves, and what we believe, both religiously and ideologically and politically. In short, everything that has to do with what makes us human. The museum is, above all, its collection; without it, there is no museum, and this heritage is preserved, restored, studied, displayed, and explained to the public, who are, in the case of a publicly owned museum (the majority in our country), the owners of said heritage. Therefore, its mission is social from the outset and is an essential part of its nature. The museum is an idea, a concept like democracy, to give an endangered example, into which different content can be injected and different ways of managing it can be employed. These contents and ways of explaining them change over time; they are healthily analyzable, criticizable, and changeable ad infinitum. But if the very concept that frames them and their primary function is questioned, be it democracy or the museum, goodbye democracy and goodbye museum. Nor is it advisable that, due to mental confusion, a cultural, historical, narrative, and heritage institution be anything other than what it was created for. It has never been intended that a hospital should assume functions, let's say, of the Ministry of Finance. It's a matter of pure common sense, and yet now, in Catalonia, the art museum is expected to assume functions of the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Social Equality, including the departments of Urban Planning and Housing, by adopting a "livable" museum model that no one knows for sure what the hell it means. All this thanks to Manolo Borja, an undisputed great professional of museography until he started believing his own press, "recovered" for Catalonia in the role of czar of its art museums (it was reported in the press, I'm not making this up) to reorient them without prior consultation with the directors of those institutions, who won their positions in public competitions based on the merit of their proposals. It was obvious that this idea by Jordi Martí (Secretary of State for Culture of the Spanish Government) was doomed to create problems, and it has. This also falls within the realm of common sense.

The MNAC race continues to avoid the transfer of the Sijena murals. This morning, the museum filed its written opposition to the execution of the ruling requiring them to return them to Aragon. According to the museum's statement, the MNAC reiterates its "technical inability to carry out the removal and transfer of the paintings due to the risk of irreparable damage that this operation entails" and maintains "the technical and legal arguments" it has defended throughout the process, "prioritizing the preservation of the work."

Hello, how are you?

The technicians of the Aragon government have entered the MNAC this Monday shortly before eleven in the morning, as reported by the ACN, and in agreement with the ruling of the Huesca courtAccording to sources from the Aragonese government, technicians have begun work on the photogrammetric survey, first of all on the profane paintings, located in room 17. The technicians did not enter the offices, where around fifty people were gathered, including Junts deputies such as Laura Borràs, the president of Junts, the president of the Republic, and the Association of Municipalities for Independence (AMI). Sources from the MNAC (National Council of Municipalities for Independence) told ACN that there are four technicians in total working normally. They will work until Wednesday.

Seven months. This is the deadline the MNAC has to move the paintings from Sijena to the chapter house of the Vilanova de Sijena monastery. Rocío Pilar Vargas, the judge of the Court of First Instance and Investigation No. 2 of Huesca, has issued the order for the final execution of the 2016 ruling upheld two months ago by the Supreme Court, and against which no appeal can be filed.

We are still reeling from this week's fires, which fortunately have been brought under control.

The president of Aragon has said these words about the Sijena works: "The sentence will be carried out willingly or by force." Deunidó, the phrase he uttered, while the MNAC (National Council of Aragon) declared "the technical inability to carry out the operation within the timeframe established by the civil procedure law."

The government of Aragon has presented this Friday in the civil court of first instance and instruction number 2 of Huesca the request for forced execution of the sentence that orders the delivery of the mural paintings of the monastery of Vilanova de Sijena that exists in the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC). As reported by ACN, the voluntary surrender period ended on Thursday, and the Aragonese government has drawn up an estimated schedule of the work the MNAC must carry out to comply with the ruling, which stipulates an approximate seven-month deadline for receiving the paintings.

Eugenia Balcells (Barcelona, ​​​​1943) is an intellectually voracious artist: he is interested in all visions of science, economy, ecology, poetry, music... His works have a scientific character and at the same time existential and spiritual, as From the center (1981-1982), a pioneering video installation that Balcells herself defines as an "electronic Stonehenge" and which the MNAC is now presenting in its final version in the Oval Room after the Generalitat (Catalan government) purchased it for its collection. "I was seeking above all to capture, in some way, the intrinsically variable and changing nature of reality," explains Eugenia Balcells. "Reality is not just a series of physical objects next to each other, but rather we participate in an energetic dance; we are part of an incredible energetic dance that is working."